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Wars of Seeing: Suffering and Sentiment in Joseph Wright’s The Dead Soldier

Philip Shaw

I

In eighteenth-century British culture, military painting can be roughly divided into

two distinct forms: portraits and battle scenes. Portraits, such as Sir Joshua

Reynold’s Portrait of John, Marquis of Granby in the uniform of Col. of Royal

Regiment of Horse Guards (c.1770), helped to establish an image of the man at arms

as noble, beneficent and fiercely loyal, while battle scenes, which focussed typically

on victories rather than defeats, were prized for their topographical and historical

accuracy, and for their ability to instil a sense of national pride. For all their sublime

ambitions, battle scenes painted in Britain in this period fail, on the whole to match

the aesthetic heights established by Uccello in The Battle of San Romano (1438-40),

or by Rubens in Henry IV at the Battle of Ivry (1627-1630).1 Similarly, of the

numerous military portraits produced in this century only a handful could be

described as distinguished in any genuine artistic sense. Notable examples would

include, in addition to Reynolds’s innovative portrayals of Granby and Colonel

Tarleton (1782), John Singleton Copley’s The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January

1781 (1783), and, perhaps most notably, Benjamin West’s The Death of General

Wolfe (1770). West’s and Copley’s portraits are remarkable for two reasons. First,

from a stylistic point of view, both paintings overturn the conventions of history

painting, which dictated that historical figures should be clothed in classical attire.

Both Wolfe and Peirson, together with their attendants, are shown in modern,

military dress, thus imbuing the timelessness of the scene with documentary

significance. Second, in both cases, the allusion to the Medieval and Renaissance

pietà tradition, in which the dead or dying Christ is shown cradled in the arms of

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Mary, helps to establish an impression of noble sacrifice: the officer-hero is Christ-

like insofar as he gives his life so that we, the nation, might be free.2

In terms of how death and wounding on the field of battle were perceived by

eighteenth-century audiences, the apotheosis of the military leader served a distinct

ideological function. To adapt Elaine Scarry’s analysis, in the military pietà ‘the

incontestable reality of the body – the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead

and hard to dispose of – is separated from its source and conferred on an ideology or

issue or instance of political authority impatient of, or deserted by, benign sources of

substantiation.’ The body of Wolfe or Peirson, that is, serves to draw attention away

from war’s investment in the ‘activity of reciprocal injuring’.3 By focussing on the

officer-hero’s indifference to pain, his ability to withstand even the most calamitous

event, the viewer thus becomes indifferent to the all-too-human carnage that state-

sponsored representations seek to occlude.

An important aspect of this process of occlusion is the success of the

viewer’s schooling in the discourse of the sublime. In the eighteenth century, as is

well known, the concept of the sublime was taken up with alacrity by political

economists, social theorists and moral philosophers as well as by aestheticians. In

essence, meditations on sublimity were linked to larger discussions of how

individuals and states orientate themselves in relation to experiences of shock, terror

or pain. Key to the management of shock is the cultivation of aesthetic distance. As

Edmund Burke comments, when ‘danger or death press too nearly, they are

incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and

with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful’. In the aesthetic

contemplation of scenes of distress, such as the view of a dead or dying soldier,

‘objects which in the reality would shock’ become the source of ‘a very high species

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of pleasure’. Our delight, however, is touched also by feelings of sympathy, which

Burke describes as ‘a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of

another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected’. 4 When we observe the

dying hero bearing his wounds with dignity and calm we subtly reciprocate his

capacity for stoical endurance; we become, in other words, ourselves a noble man at

arms.

The relations between sublimity and the management of pain have a

particular connection with conceptions of military prowess. As John Baillie argues in

An Essay on the Sublime (1747) ‘the affections’ deemed ‘unquestionably sublime’

are ‘heroism, or desire of conquest, such as in Alexander or Caesar; love of one’s

country’ and ‘the contempt of death’.5 Likewise in James Beattie’s Dissertations

Moral and Critical (1783), the military leader, ‘notwithstanding his violent nature’ is

admired for his ‘strength of mind’, his ‘self-command’, his ‘intrepidity in danger’,

his ‘coolness [. . .] in the midst of perplexity’ and for his ‘unwearied activity’. These

qualities, Beattie concludes, ‘are astonishing’.6 Of all these qualities, it is the leader’s

ability to endure suffering that astonishes the most. Shortly after the death of General

Wolfe at Quebec in 1759, the London Chronicle published a poetic epitaph in which

the ‘noble spirit’ is extolled for his dignity in the face of death. Like Cato, he

sacrifices himself, calmly and without protest, for the greater good.7 In the same

year, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, praises the military genius as

the man who, amidst ‘the hardships and hazards of war, maintains this control of his

passive feelings [. . .] He does not merely affect the sentiments of the impartial

spectator; he really adopts them. He almost identifies himself with, he almost

becomes himself that impartial spectator.’8 What the hero’s sacrifice communicated

to civilian spectators of war was, effectively, a lesson in self-abnegation. As Adam

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Ferguson announced in 1767, ‘he who has not learned to resign his personal freedom

in the field [with] the same magnanimity with which he maintains it in the political

deliberations of his country, has yet to learn the most important lesson of civil

society, and is only fit to occupy a place in a rude, or in a corrupted state.’9 When

faced, therefore, with the image of the dying Wolfe, the spectator is expected to

identify with the officer hero’s self-command, ‘to become himself that impartial

spectator’.

II

Let us bear this lesson in mind as we turn now to consider a very different depiction

of the sufferings of war. This is Joseph Wright’s painting of The Dead Soldier

(fig1),10 exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition at Somerset House in May 1789

on the cusp of the French Revolution.11 In a rare departure from traditional military

portraiture, the painting depicts a grieving widow and her newly orphaned child

beside the body of an unidentified British soldier, a victim of the recent American

War of Independence or possibly, for reasons that will become apparent, of the

Seven Years War. Immediately, our attention is captured by the steady gaze of the

naked baby and the despairing attitude of the mother. This is not an image of noble

sacrifice or triumphalism; the effects of war, the painting suggests, extend beyond

the field of battle, blighting the lives of ordinary civilians as well as ordinary

soldiers. On this basis, it is tempting to regard The Dead Soldier as a contribution to

an emergent ‘anti-war’ culture; the visual equivalent of the numerous protest poems

published in the wake of Britain’s entry into the war against revolutionary and

Napoleonic France.12 As we shall see, however, the political significance of the

painting’s imagery is rather more complex than this.

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Surprisingly, given its undoubtedly disturbing content, Wright’s Dead

Soldier proved to be extremely popular with the gallery-going public, and for many

years it was esteemed as the painter’s most artistically successful work. In 1797,

Wright’s obituary stated that ‘The Dead Soldier … would alone establish his

fame’.13 By 1814, when the work came up for auction, it was described as Wright’s

‘acknowledged Chef d’ouvre … uniting great knowledge of grouping, excellent

drawing, and correct colouring, with a fine feeling of sentiment’.14 The fact that the

print was still in production as late as 1829 testifies to its enduring popularity: more

than the candle light paintings of the 1760s, or the celebrated storm and fireworks

paintings of Wright’s later years, it was the image of a grieving widow clutching the

wrist of her dead soldier husband, as she nurses her innocent babe, that captured the

public imagination both during and beyond the war years.

But how, precisely, did viewers of the time respond to The Dead Soldier?

When the fashionable Whig poet, William Hayley viewed the painting he declared it

to be the ‘flower of the royal exhibition. His dying soldier made me literally shed

tears.’15 In light of what has been said thus far on the emulation of the officer-hero’s

sangfroid how should we understand this extreme and potentially dissident display

of sensibility? Bearing Hayley’s literary background in mind it is likely that the poet

would have recognized the allusion in the accompanying exhibition catalogue to

‘Langhorn’s [sic] poems’.16 Since its publication in the mid 1770s, John

Langhorne’s verses on the aftermath of the Seven Years War, from his long poem

The Country Justice, had become something of a byword for sentimental depictions

of military suffering. The lines are as follows:

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Cold on Canadian Hills, or Minden’s Plain,

Perhaps that Parent mourn’d her soldier Slain;

Bent o’er her Babe, her Eye dissolv’d in Dew,

The big Drops, mingling with the Milk He Drew,

Gave the sad Presage of his future Years,

The Child of Misery, Baptiz’d in Tears!17

The image of the dead soldier, his grieving widow and orphaned child resonated with

the book-buying public. More often than not this image was praised for its beauty

and was frequently cited in sentimental literature as an incentive for acts of charity.

In the anonymous Adventures of a Hackney Coach (1783), for instance, the sight of a

semi-naked female beggar nursing a child prompts a worthy gentleman to provide

assistance and to acknowledge ‘divine Langhorne!’ for having ‘beautifully …

pictured a scene like that just before me’.18 A few years later, Charlotte Smith, in

Rural Walks (1795), cites Langhorne as support for charitable acts. ‘On these

occasions’, opines the fictional donor, Mrs Woodfield, ‘I seldom fail to recollect

some beautiful lines of Langhorne’s, which contain a pathetic apology for the

unhappy wanderers called common beggars’. Located at a strategic point in the

narrative when, confronted by the sight of a beggar, a party of young women debate

the rights and wrongs of indiscriminate charity, Langhorne’s ‘pathetic apology’

effectively suspends the question of whether or not the beggar is ‘an idle vagabond’

or a ‘poor man … accidentally distressed in a strange country’.19 Scenes of distress,

in other words, whether presented in poetry, prints, or in real life communicate

suffering by way of a direct appeal to the heart, rather than to the head.

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But what connection do these lines have with The Dead Soldier? To answer

this question we must consider the events that inspired Langhorne’s verses. In 1759,

both Minden and Quebec were widely hailed as the crowning victories of the Allied

campaigns against the French. But whilst these battles undoubtedly signalled a turn

in the fortunes of the Seven Years War, favourable to the British and their allies, the

peace, when it came, proved an equivocal blessing, placing a considerable burden on

the economic as well as the physical resources of the nation. By the time of the

signing of the Treaty of Paris, the national debt had almost doubled and the severe

taxation measures, put in to effect to relieve the economy, had a deleterious effect,

not only on relations with the colonies but also, more immediately, on the domestic

purse. Returning soldiers and their families, in particular, faced severe financial

hardships as a result of their endeavours overseas. As the dissenting preacher,

Ebenezer Radcliffe opined in 1762:

Whether we consider the numbers of combatants concern’d, or the many

engagements that have been fought; the present war has been the most

fatal the world ever saw. In the space of six years there have been above

twenty pitch’d battles, in which above a hundred thousand men have

fallen by the sword, besides innumerable multitudes who have been

destroyed by sickness, cold, and famine … look into those melancholy

villages, and tell me where their wretched inhabitants are fled. – The

tottering tenements falling into dust, make a grave for those who once

inhabited them. – All is solemn silence; – or if there be a cry heard, it is

the lamentations of orphans and widows for a father, a brother, or a

husband slain in battle.20

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Radcliff’s attentions are directed to the sufferings of war’s victims overseas, but the

effects of war on the home front, as Jacob Jefferson informed the mainly academic

congregation of St. Mary’s, Oxford on 5 May 1763, were also severe:

But great and important as our conquests and acquisitions are, they can

hardly afford any joy, when it is considered how dearly purchased they

were with the blood of thousands of our gallant countrymen; and how

many parents, widows and orphans are left disconsolate and destitute to

bemoan the loss. But affecting as this is, it is perhaps not the worst. For

we are ready to think even these happy, who fell in a foreign climate, and

saw their native country no more, in comparison of those maimed

miserable objects, sad monuments of the worse than brutal encounters of

a day of battle, that now so frequently fall in our way, and at the sight of

whom our very bowels yearn within us.21

One important factor, bearing on the composition of these sermons, concerns

the government’s failure, both during and after the war, to provide adequate care for

the children of deceased servicemen. As the author of An Account of the Foundling

Hospital in London observed: ‘the greater part of [the children] admitted at this time,

had been made orphans by the battle of Minden’.22 Founded in 1739 by the

philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coran, the Foundling Hospital was established as a

children’s home for the education and maintenance of ‘exposed and deserted young

children’.23 In 1756, at the outbreak of the Seven Years War, the hospital came

under the jurisdiction of parliament and the philanthropist Jonas Hanway was elected

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governor. Hanway, who maintained a keen interest in military and naval charities,

was an appropriate choice, not least in respect of his advocacy of population increase

as a means of sustaining the war effort. Under the new policy, funded by

government, the hospital was thus required to open its doors to all children and the

maximum age for admission was raised from two to twelve months. In less than four

years nearly 15,000 children were presented to the hospital, a sum that pleased

Hanway, who noted in his own account of the hospital that a ‘great number of those

who might [otherwise] be sleeping with their fathers in church yards’ were now

available to ‘the navies and armies’.24 The hospital, in other words, could now be

regarded as a mechanism for producing both the agents and the victims of

destruction; an irony that may not have been lost on viewers of Hogarth’s March to

Finchley, a painting on display in one of the hospital’s public rooms since 1750. For

just as the soldiers in The March to Finchley, although ostensibly released by

military discipline from the anti-social chaos of the painting’s foreground march

ultimately to their deaths, so the hospital’s open door policy was designed to feed,

rather than relieve, the devastations of war.

Another, more immediate, but no less unfortunate consequence of the open

door policy was a marked increase in the numbers of homeless children found

wandering the countryside, as poor parishes, in a bid to reduce spending on the poor,

sent their orphans to London. By 1772, the year in which Langhorne was appointed

Justice of the Peace to the county of Somerset, the ‘lamentations’ of numerous

wandering orphans and widows, together with the cries of the maimed and the

destitute may well have promoted the poet to revise his opinion of his country’s

triumphs. And like his fellow clergymen, Radcliff and Jefferson, the figure of the

orphan, which the rational mind conceived as an undesirable consequence of the

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government’s military-fiscal policy, was adapted by the poet as a sentimental and

highly potent symbol of national waste and ruin.

The Country Justice, the poem in which Langhorne addresses this figure, was

published in three parts in 1774, 1775 and 1777. A popular and critical success, the

poem as a whole takes issue with the old Poor Laws, and lays particular stress on the

humane treatment of beggars and vagrants. In his capacity as a magistrate,

Langhorne would have been familiar with the uncompromising tone of English

statutes on the homeless in this period. In Michael Dalton’s The Country Justice, for

instance, a manual for Justices of the Peace dating from the late seventeenth century

and reissued with revisions throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, the

chapter on ‘Rogues and Vagabonds’ states that ‘[i]dleness, which of itself is the root

of all evil’ should be ‘very much repressed’.25 Having decried the ‘[i]nfinite swarms

of idle Vagabonds … which wander up and down, to the great danger and indignity

of our Nation’, Dalton advises that such persons should be ‘stripped naked from the

middle upwards, and … whipped till their Body be bloody’ prior to being sent to a

house of correction for no less than a year.26 Although the law relating to rogues and

vagabonds was amended in 1740, it remained within the power of Justices of the

Peace to sentence vagrants to corporal punishment and to lengthy periods of

incarceration.

Langhorne’s poem was in fact suggested by his friend and sponsor Richard

Burn, Justice of the Peace for the counties of Westmorland and Cumberland and the

respected author of several legal manuals and commentaries. In his 1764 History of

the Poor Laws, Burn observes that the history of British laws concerning vagrants

resembles ‘the history of the savages in America. Almost all severities have been

exercised against vagrants, except scalping’. Burn goes on to catalogue the

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punishments meted out to vagrants since ‘the turbulent times of the great barons’,

which ranged from pillorying and whipping, to starving, branding and other forms of

mutilation. Since none of these measures have lessened the numbers of vagrants

Burn’s conclusion is that ‘punishment alone is not sufficient. Therefore the remedy

must be sought elsewhere’. The remedy he proposes is radical: outlaw the practice of

giving ‘well meant but very ill judged charity’ and begging, he argues, ‘would be at

an end in a fortnight’ since the onus for managing and maintaining the poor would

then fall on parishes rather than on individuals.27

The author’s critique of the laws and punishments concerning vagrants

extends to the treatment of disbanded soldiers and seamen. Despite the fact that the

amended poor laws made allowances for the movements of returning soldiers, Burn

notes that soldiers lacking appropriate certification from their commanding officers

could be arrested for vagrancy and treated accordingly.28 The wives and children of

deceased soldiers were no less vulnerable. Prior to the introduction of the national

welfare system, created to assist the families of men serving in the British Army and

Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, women and children

were dependent on the parish-based poor relief system. On arriving at her place of

settlement, a widow was required to present herself to the Justice of the Peace who

would then be obliged, on the understanding that the dead soldier had ‘continued

faithful to his Trust, and not deserted the same by taking up Arms’ against the

crown, to apply to the County Treasurer for relief on the woman’s behalf.29 If the

woman was unable to prove her settlement or if relief, for whatever reason, was not

made available, she could find herself charged under the vagrancy laws. As The

Laws Respecting Women, published in 1777, stated: ‘[w]omen wandering and

begging in parishes and places to which they do not belong’ were to be conveyed to

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a justice, ‘who shall examine her, and commit her to the house of correction’ and

‘who may if they see convenient, order her to be publicly whipped’.30

Disturbed, like Burn, by the legislative harshness of the Poor Laws,

particularly as they applied to the wandering poor, Langhorne, in The Country

Justice, encourages his audience in the exercise of Christian principles of pity,

mercy, and love. In the poem’s ‘Apology for Vagrants’, the poet invites his readers

to ‘feel, while [the poor Vagrant] complains, / Nor from sad Freedom send to sadder

chains’. Most significantly, he asks his readers to judge all vagrants sympathetically,

irrespective of whether or not their present condition is the result of ‘Folly or

Misfortune’. Prompted by the culture of sentiment, with its emphasis on empathy

and feeling, the poet and the preacher seem at odds with the coolly rational mind of

the county magistrate. But where Langhorne departs most evidently from the views

of his legal mentor is in his support for a system of law based on rural patronage.

While Burn, for the most part, criticizes the haphazard and ill-managed practises of

the existing paternalistic system of charity, arguing that local administration should

be given over to paid overseers recruited from the ranks of the middle-classes,31

Langhorne seeks to recall the days ‘when WEALTH was Virtue’s Handmaid’ and

‘the Poor at Hand their natural Patrons saw’. The poet’s emphasis on the visibility of

the rural patron goes hand in hand with his stress on the inherent virtue of individual

acts of charity, particularly with regard to the practice of extending relief to the

wandering rural poor.

As the literary critic Beth Fowkes Tobin suggests, a centralized system

designed to prohibit the ‘face-to-face dispensing of charity’ was regarded with

suspicion by defenders of the local, paternal system on the grounds that it diminished

the number of opportunities available for the exercise of private judgement and thus

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inhibited the cultivation of private virtue.32 For men of sentiment, like Langhorne,

there was moreover a direct connection between private virtue and the common

good. In the case of alms giving to the victims of war, the charitable gesture worked

on a number of levels: providing immediate material relief whilst also serving to

cement the bonds between civilians and soldiers.

Soldiers too were expected to demonstrate feeling. As Edward Penny’s 1764

painting of The Marquis of Granby Giving Alms to a Sick Soldier and his Family

illustrates, the charitable act of the military hero effectively bridges the divide

between the private and the public spheres, enabling the viewer to regard the man of

war as, at the same time, a man of peace.33 Writing in 1760, in An Account of the

Society for the Encouragement of British Troops in Germany and North America,

Jonas Hanway had argued that ‘the distinction of the private soldier and the officer

… is absorbed in the consideration of the virtue of the man’. The idea that military

service could inspire feelings of ‘reverence’ in the breast of the ordinary citizen, a

feeling of respect so strong as to effectively collapse the division between civilians

and soldiers, leads Hanway to make the following, extraordinary claim as he

imagines an encounter with a vagrant soldier:

Does it not wound a generous heart, to see a brave fellow begging his

bread on his journey, perhaps without the least consideration of any vice

which has distressed him: perhaps after being lavish of his blood, with a

view to support his wife and children, or merely doing his duty as a

soldier? If such persons can consistently be relieved, will it not rejoice

those, who are sensible of the blessings they enjoy, in consequence of the

gallant behaviour of the very man whose wants they supply?

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The sight of a poverty-stricken soldier wounds a generous heart. What the soldier

experiences in his body is thus transferred to the psyche of the civilian observer.

Significantly, in an allusion, perhaps, to Adam Smith’s comments on the

compensatory effects of tears, the bestowal of the psychic wound prompts an

awareness in the ‘sensible’, or rational, person of the economic benefits of military

sacrifice: specifically, that person is made aware of the relations between civilized

‘blessings’ and ‘gallant behaviour’. In a final moralizing flourish, Hanway claims

that charity will ‘diffuse a spirit of benevolence’ for ‘our mutual advantage’. 34

Some ten years later, Henry Mackenzie’s best-selling novel of sensibility,

The Man of Feeling, provides a related lesson in how to behave when confronted

with the sight of misfortune. In chapter 24, the novel’s protagonist, Mr Harley,

becomes reacquainted with his childhood friend John Edwards, a pauperized tenant

farmer turned soldier:

He was one of those figures which Salvator would have drawn; nor was

the surrounding scenery unlike the wildness of that painter’s backgrounds

… A rock with some dangling wild flowers, jutted out above where the

soldier lay, on which grew the stump of a large tree, white with age, and

a single twisted branch shaded his face as he slept … He had that steady

look of sorrow, which indicates that its owner has gazed upon his griefs

until he has forgotten how to lament them.35

Couched, by way of the allusion to the paintings of Salvator Rosa, in the rhetoric of

the natural sublime, the discharged soldier is depicted as ‘wild’, ‘twisted’ and

15

sorrowful; his years of promise brutally curtailed. The story Edwards relates to

Harley is, accordingly, unflinching in its portrayal of the material rigours and

injustices of military life and culminates in a typically lachrymose pledge of mutual

love:

When Edwards had ended his relation, Harley stood for a while looking

at him in silence; at last he pressed him in his arms, and when he had

given full vent to the fullness of his heart by a shower of tears, ‘Edwards,

said he, let me hold thee to my bosom, let me imprint the virtue of thy

sufferings on my soul. Come, my honoured veteran! Let me endeavour to

soften the last days of a life, worn out in the service of humanity: call me

also your son, and let me cherish you as a father.’ Edwards, from whom

the recollection of his own sufferings had scarce forced a tear, now

blubbered like a boy; he could not speak his gratitude, but by some short

exclamations of blessings upon Harley.36

Like Hanway’s wounded heart, Harley imprints ‘the virtue’ of the soldier’s

‘sufferings’ on his soul. Although separated by class, the two men are united in a

quasi-familial bond with Harley claiming Edwards as a surrogate father. But mutual

tears cannot disguise the fact that the terms of patronage are weighted heavily in

favour of Harley. It is Edwards, after all, who blubbers ‘like a boy’, and the

landowner’s decision to bestow on his ‘father’ a small farm is of a piece with the

‘vertical links’ of rural patronage.

Standing before Wright’s Dead Soldier, William Hayley might have felt

compelled to reciprocate Harley’s behaviour by imprinting the image of the soldier’s

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sacrifice on his soul, and like many other viewers he may well have gone on to relay

this virtue through the exercise of charitable relief. The belief that aesthetic delight in

the presentation of suffering encouraged benevolence did not, however, go

unopposed. The moral philosopher Dugald Stewart, for instance, in his Elements of

the Philosophy of the Human Mind, maintained that fictional representations of

misery deaden the ‘active habits … the sensibility which terminates in imagination,

is but a refined and selfish luxury … nothing can advance our moral improvement,

but an attention to the active duties which belong to our stations’. More prescient

perhaps than he intended, Stewart’s comments get to the heart of the matter. For

there is nothing intrinsically virtuous about shedding tears before a graphic depiction

of suffering and nor, for that matter, is there anything progressive in the exercise of

charitable relief. What the charitable transaction masks, that is, is a conservative

attachment to ‘stations’. In terms of military charity, as Hanway points out, ‘[t]he

truth is, that such kindnesses … have at all times fired the soldier’s breast with the

greatest resolution, confirmed his fidelity, and created a more generous contempt of

death’. Charity works, in other words, to enforce the bonds of patronage, which spur

the common soldier on in pursuit of his country’s glory. The soldier, in short, will

become a better killer if he is properly treated.

As we have seen, the benefactor is no less altered; through sensibility of the

soldier’s sacrifice, the person of rank is united with the common soldier in mutual

recognition of the greater good. Charity, so the argument runs, is to the benefit of all.

Yet perhaps this is not the entire story for, to extend Stewart’s terms, that sensibility

which terminates in imagination only, which stands fixated before the signs of

visible distress unable to convey feeling into action, may be symptomatic, not merely

17

of an attitude of ‘selfish luxury’, but also, perhaps, of a rising undercurrent of

dissatisfaction with the very terms in which military sacrifice is understood.

It is with this thought in mind that I wish to turn to a closer consideration of

the painting itself. How should we as spectators – impartial or otherwise – respond to

the arresting gaze of the orphaned child? In a restricted sense, and with a glance back

to the conservative ideologies of Jonas Hanway, Richard Burn, and indeed John

Langhorne, Wright may have desired his audience to respond to the infant’s gaze

with an attitude of parental concern. ‘This Love [for children]’, as the philosopher

Francis Hutcheson argues, ‘makes them Parts of ourselves …. And where-ever we

find a Determination … to mutual Love, let each Individual be look’d upon as a Part

of a great Whole, or System, and concern himself in the publick Good of it.’37 By

exercising our capacity for ‘mutual love’, the child will be returned to the bosom of

the nation, where, presumably, it will be nurtured and protected from further

violation. Such a reading might well explain the sentimental tears of Hayley, a man

who, despite his opposition to the war with America, could yet regard military

painting as an important instrument for the dissemination of patriotic feeling. In a

related vein, for all its pathos and horror, one might argue that The Dead Soldier

provides sentimental compensation for war, with the orphaned child functioning as a

spur to aesthetic and social unification, the part returned to its place in the whole.

But there is, I believe, something excessive about the child’s gaze that seems

to militate against this conservative reading. For unlike Wright’s earlier works there

is no representation within the picture that will serve as a model for the resurrection

of the public good. In the absence of such a model, the viewer outside the frame is

forced to look inwards – and what does this viewer find? In the highlighting of the

mother’s breast, a disturbing eroticism militating against the transcendence of the

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sensual; in the attention given to the makeshift shelter, a model of the temporary or

vagrant nature of the private sphere, an ‘artistic’ enclosure threatened by the

encroachment of battle. Still further, when a comparison is made with a slightly later

version of the painting, some additional details become apparent.

In the version of The Dead Soldier held in the collection of the San Francisco

Legion of Honor museum a somewhat crudely rendered battle scene has been added

to the background, placing further emphasis on the harmful relations between the

military and domestic spheres. The painter has also intensified the colouring of the

original version, shrouding the family group in chiaroscuro, highlighting the scarlet

of the soldier’s jacket and the dark blue of the widow’s dress. If we look closely we

also note the soldier’s gangrenous hand, a touch of morbidity echoed in the cuts and

bruises on the widow’s neck. For whatever reason, Wright felt moved in this version

of the painting to exceed the discourse of sentiment; as we gaze on the painting’s

stark presentation of the decaying body – both the decaying body of the soldier and,

by metaphorical extension, the decaying social body that is the family – the

discourse of sentiment works hard to overcome creeping sensations of pain, terror

and disgust. In this version of The Dead Soldier, I would suggest, the beneficent

viewer no longer considers the opportunities that war presents for the exercise of

private virtue; instead he is brought into an uncomfortable encounter with the

underlying matter of war: its investment in waste and ruin and the reciprocal

destruction of human beings.

III

The idea of The Dead Soldier as an anti-war painting is complicated, however, when

we consider the influence of Wright’s patron, the Manchester silk manufacturer,

militia leader, and art collector, John Leigh Philips. From correspondence exchanged

19

between Wright and Philips in the spring of 1789 it is evident that Philips purchased

The Dead Soldier, framed, for 100 guineas. In 1814, the painting was listed in A

Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Paintings and Drawings, Prints and

Etchings ... of the Late John Leigh Philips.38 Clearly, Wright’s work was much

prized by its owner. But what, precisely, was the nature of the relationship between

painter and patron and what significance did a painting like The Dead Soldier have

for a man like Philips?

Born 23 November 1761, John Leigh Philips was the son of John Philips,

founder of the Manchester cotton spinning firm, Philips and Lee and a prominent

Unitarian. Like most narratives of mercantile self-fashioning, interest in the socially

progressive values of Unitarianism began to wane as the Philips moved from the

margins to the centre of society, so much so that by 1824, the year of John Philips’s

death, the family’s Unitarian background had been effectively erased, as Philips’s

obituary describes ‘his unshaken loyalty to the King, and the most decided

attachment to his country, its Constitution, and its established Religion.’39 An

indicator of the Philips’s growth in social prestige and power is given by the fact that

John Philips was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Lancashire and Cheshire, and

Chairman of the Magistrates at Stockport, appointments that would only have been

made to a man in possession of a large fortune and no longer associated with

business.40

When Philips’s sons, John Leigh and Francis reached maturity, their social

legitimacy was confirmed through membership of a number of high-ranking loyalist

institutions: these included, in the late 1770s, the Royal Manchester Volunteers, in

which the young John Leigh served, without seeing active service, as second

Lieutenant and, in the 1790s, the Manchester and Salford Volunteers, which John

20

Leigh commanded from 1797-1804. As Mark Philp’s comments, ‘leadership of a

volunteer corps was seen as a just expression of [the Manchester manufacturers]

claim to high office within the community ... a chance to bestow paternalism and

display wealth’.41 It also provided such men with an opportunity to declare,

disseminate, and ultimately substantiate an ideology based on loyalty to the Crown

and the Constitution. In the words of a handbill, circulated in 1776, the Royal

Manchester Volunteers thus sought to unite all ‘Gallant and Loyal Lancashire Men,

Who wish to share the Honors of their KING, and to suppress the daring Spirit of

Rebellion, which hath been so presumptuously cherished and supported by the open

and secret Enemies to his Majesty and the British Constitution’.42

As the Philips’s became more secure in their commercial and social standing,

its members came to adopt the values and beliefs of the conservative establishment.

Thus, in the 1790s, Francis Philips joined the Association for the Protection of

Constitutional Order and Liberty Against Republicans and Levellers (APCOL), and

in the 1800s Francis became president of the Manchester Pitt Club president, his

brother John Leigh being listed as a member. Philp adds that John Leigh appeared as

a signatory on most loyalist addresses and petitions drawn up in Manchester.43

The picture of John Leigh Philips that emerges here is of a committed

opponent of reform and an ardent supporter of the ministry – perhaps not the sort of

man we would expect to purchase a supposedly anti-war painting. Yet it is important

to note that in spite of his opposition to reformist causes Philips was also a

committed member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Through

membership of this society Philips would have come into contact with a diverse

group of Unitarians, Presbyterians, surgeons, and physicians, many of whom held

progressive or radical views. Thomas Barnes, a leading Presbyterian minister, who

21

was a founder member of the Society and vice-president for 1781-84, was also active

as a member of the Manchester Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and

chaired a meeting in 1789 to renew the application to parliament for the repeal of the

Test and Corporation Acts. Another prominent member, Thomas Cooper M.D. ‘the

well-known materialist’, who served as vice-president from 1786-1791, journeyed to

revolutionary France in 1792 as a representative of the Manchester Constitutional

Society. Honorary members included the liberal reformers and Unitarians, Joseph

Priestley and William Rathbone.

In the context of this radical-oriented grouping, dedicated to the pursuit of

Truth and Liberty, Philips’s membership seems somewhat incongruous. Yet, in

many ways, the question of whether or not Philips sympathized with his fellow

members’ progressive political opinions is largely irrelevant. For Philips,

notwithstanding his antipathy to reformist causes, maintained genial relations with a

number of political opponents, from his liberal minded cousins Robert and George to

his pro-Jacobin friend Thomas Cooper. It may well be that the category of the

aesthetic provided such men with a politically neutral ground on which to meet,

though ‘neutral’ barely disguises the very real sense in which the cultivation of taste

was regarded as an important component of the manufacturer and merchantman’s

rise to respectability.

But how did this society work in practice? In 1785, two years before his pro-

reform ‘Propositions Respecting the Foundation of Civil Government’ was read to

the Society, the radical Thomas Cooper delivered a paper entitled ‘Observations

Among the Ancients on the Art of Painting’ in the course of which he credits Philips

for having circulated among the members a selection of accurate copies of ‘the

antique paintings discovered at Herculaneum’. Philips and Cooper’s engagement

22

with what David Solkin calls the ‘moral conversation’ of painting44 yields the

following, significant detail:

[I]t was Aristides the Theban who principally excelled in this sublime art

of painting: qui primus omnium animum pinxit et sensus hominis

expressit, quæ vocant græci ethe; item perturbationes. Durior paulo in

coloribus. Hujus picture est oppido capto ad matris, morientis è vulnere,

mamman adrepends infans: intelligiturque sensire matrem et timere ne

emortuo lacte sanguinem lambat. We shall not easily find a production of

modern art superior to this …45

The Latin quotation is taken from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and translates

thus:

One of the contemporaries of Apelles was Aristides of Thebes; the first

of all the painters to give full expression to the mind and passions of

man, known to the Greeks as êthê, as well as to the mental perturbations

which we experience: he was somewhat harsh, however, in his colours.

There is a picture by him of a Captured City, in which is represented an

infant crawling toward the breast of its wounded mother, who, though at

the point of death, has all the appearance of being aware of it, and of

being in dread lest the child should suck blood in place of milk from her

exhausted breast: this picture Alexander the Great ordered to be

transferred to Pella, his native place.46

23

Appended to this quotation in the published version of the paper is a footnote in

which Cooper or possibly Philips, in his capacity as a member of the ‘Committee of

Papers’, adds: ‘[t]his is not dissimilar to a beautiful thought in Dr. Langhorne’s

Country Justice’. The footnote then goes on to quote the relevant and, by now

ubiquitous, lines from Langhorne’s poem.47

Pliny’s account of Aristides’s ‘sublime’ painting certainly bears an uncanny

resemblance to the composition of The Dead Soldier and it is possible that Philips

conveyed the description to Wright. But whether or not the painter knew of the

Natural History, he was certainly familiar with The Country Justice and, as a youth,

appears to have known the poem’s author.48 In any case, irrespective of their

contrasting political attitudes, the combination of Aristides’s êthê and Langhorne’s

‘beautiful thoughts’ provided Wright and the members of the Manchester Literary

and Philosophical Society with a shocking yet ultimately compensatory view of the

devastating effects of war on ordinary soldiers and their families. I would suggest

that it was on this basis that Lieutenant-Colonel Philips may well have admired and

understood the depiction of suffering in Wright’s painting.

1 John Wootton’s Battle of Blenheim (c.1740) and David Morier’s An Incident in the

Rebellion of 1745 (1746) may be regarded as distinguished exceptions to this rule.

2 This chapter draws on material published in P. Shaw, ‘Dead Soldiers: Suffering in

British Military Art, 1783-1789’, Romanticism, 11 (2005) 55-69.

3 E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 62.

24

4 E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and

Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,

1990), p. 36; p. 41.

5 The quotation from Baillie’s Essay on the Sublime is from an extract included in

The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteen-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. by A.

Ashfield and P. de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 93.

6 From an extract published in Ashfield and de Bolla, p. 183.

7 London Chronicle or Universal Evening Post, Thursday, October 25, 1759; Issue

442.

8 A. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2006), p.

141.

9 A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (New Brunswick and

London: Transaction Books, 1980), p. 148.

10 The painting shown here, which is currently owned by the University of Michigan,

is one of four extant versions – the others are held at Yale University, San Francisco

Legion of Honor Museum and the Holburne Museum, Bath. The modelling of the

soldier’s behind has been corrected in the other versions suggesting that the

Michigan painting is most likely the original. I am grateful to Allan Reynolds for

alerting me to this possibility.

11 For further details see R. Rosenblum, ‘Sources of Two Paintings by Joseph Wright

of Derby’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 25 (1962), 135-6.

12 For a reading of poems critical of the war against France see S. Bainbridge, British

Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conflict (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2003), chapter 1.

13 From an obituary published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 67, 2 (1797), p. 804.

25

14 Quotation from A Catalogue of the Valuable Collection of Paintings and

Drawings, Prints and Etchings, Cabinet of Insects and c. (The Property of the Late

John Philips, Esq.) – sold at auction Manchester 31 October 1814, p. 40.

15 Extract from a letter sent by Hayley to his wife on 5 May, 1789. Hannah Wright

cites the account in her memoir of her father. MS held at Derby Central Library.

16 R.A. Catalogue, no. 236. Cited by Rosenblum, p. 135.

17 J. Langhorne, The Country Justice. A Poem. By one of His Majesty’s Justices of

the Peace for the County of Somerset. Part the First (London, 1774), p. 17.

18 Anonymous, The Adventure of a Hackney Coach (London, 1781), p. 87.

19 C. Smith, Rural Walks: in Dialogues. Intended for the Use of Young Persons

(London, 1795), p. 52.

20 E. Radcliff, A Prospect of Our Success in the Present War: Being a Sermon

Preached at Crutched-Friars, on the 12th of March 1762 (London, 1762), pp. 6-7.

21 J. Jefferson, The Blessing of Peace and the Means of Preserving It. A Sermon

Preached Before the University of Oxford, at St. Mary’s, on Thursday, May 5.

M.D.C.C.LXIII … (Oxford, 1763), pp. 8-9.

22 An Account of the Foundling Hospital in London, for the Maintenance and

Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children (London, 1799), p.34.

23 Regulations for Managing the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of

Exposed and Deserted Young Children. By order of the Governors of the Said

Hospital (London, 1757), p.11.

24 J. Hanway, A Candid Historical Account of the Hospital for the Reception of

Exposed and Deserted Young Children ... (London, 1759), p.25. In 1756, John

Douglas, an opponent of Britain’s involvement in Germany, made the following

caustic observation: ‘no good Reason can be assigned why the Introduction of

26

foreign Troops, and the Foundling Hospital by Vote of Parliament, should not go

Hand in Hand, unless the former was intended to be the Means of increasing the

Number of Candidates for the latter’. A Serious Defence of Some Late Measures of

the Administration; Particularly with Regard to the Introduction and Establishment

of Foreign Troops (London, 1756), p.18.

25 M. Dalton, The Country Justice: Containing the Practice of the Justices of the

Peace Out of Their Sessions … (London, 1705), p. 201.

26 Dalton, pp.205-6.

27 R. Burn, The History of the Poor Laws (London, 1764), pp.120-2.

28 The Statutes at Large, Containing All the Publick Acts of Parliament From the

Seventh Year of the Reign of His Present Majesty King George the Second, to the

Fourteenth Year of His Present Majesty’s Reign Inclusive … (London, 1742), VII,

378-88. The amended law made provision for ‘the relief of sick, hurt, and maimed

soldiers’ in possession of appropriate certification. See R. Burn, The Justice of the

Peace, and Parish Officer. By Richard Burn, ... The Eleventh Edition (London,

1770), IV, 201.

29 Legal Provisions for the Poor: Or, A Treatise of the Common and Statute Laws

Concerning the Poor, Either as Relief, Settlement, or Punishment, third edition

(London, 1715), pp. 314-5.

30 The Laws Respecting Women, As They Regard Their Natural Rights, or Their

Connections and Conduct … In Four Books (London, 1777), p. 104.

31 Burn, The History of the Poor Laws …., pp. 214-5.

32 B. Fowkes Tobin, Superintending the Poor: Charitable ladies and Paternal

Landlords in British Fiction, 1770-1860 (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 1993), p. 2.

27

33 D. H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in

Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

1992), 204.

34 J. Hanway, An Account of the Society for the Encouragement of British Troops in

Germany and North America (London, 1760), p. 68.

35 H. Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (London, 1771), pp. 172-3

36 Mackenzie, p. 193.

37 F. Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue

(London, 1728), p. 161. Quoted in Solkin, p. 234.

38 Manuscripts and documents held at Derby Central Library

39 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 44 (1824), 624

40 For detailed discussion of Philips’s background and political sympathies see M.

Philp, Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797-

1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 62-6.

41 Philp, p. 64.

42 From a handbill published in Manchester, 1776 held in the Huntington Library.

43 Philp, p. 63. 44 Solkin, p. 214. 45 T. Cooper, ‘Observations on the Art of Painting; Among the Ancients’. A paper

read to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on 21 December, 1785.

Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester (London, 1790),

III, 510-97; 525.

46 The Natural History, Pliny the Elder, trans. John Bostock (London, 1855), VI,

263.

47 Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, p. 525.

28

48 B. Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Light (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1968), I, 153-4.